You know, it occurs to me that in the two-plus years I’ve been doing Blogress Reports, I’ve barely written about Tasakeru at all. Which is weird, because Tasakeru is supposed to be my magnum opus, my passion project. I know at least part of the reason I don’t write about it is because I want to avoid spoiling the story for my readers, but still.

Well, this week I’ll be discussing it at least a little, because I have an important retcon that I’ve made as of last week. Normally I believe retcons should be applied as organically as possible, so that the audience doesn’t even notice them, but I think it’s important to call attention to this one.

Those of you who read Tasakeru (WHICH SHOULD BE ALL OF YOU, DAMMIT) know Lady Nadeshiko Argenteus by now. She’s the prickly, stoic, and ungodly stubborn Field Commander and Vice-Mistress of the Silver Order, and next in line for its leadership. Nadeshiko has had a wild journey as far as her character development goes; brutal honesty, I originally created her as a bit character for one scene in a “bad future” AU roleplay that I was hashing out with VDrake. She was supposed to be in that scene and then quietly disappear from the story… except she didn’t. I ended up bringing her back, and she patently refused to stay as a bit character. Something about her fascinated me, so I wrote a much younger Nadeshiko into the first draft of Eternity Awakes. She became a prominent supporting character and got a few chapters largely to herself in Books III through VI, and by the time I hit the wall with the first draft of Warriors, I was setting her up to play an even bigger role. As of the relaunch, she debuted in Book I, and she’s now the most important character aside from the primary antagonists and the Outcasts themselves. So basically, most of the history of Nadeshiko’s development has consisted of ignoring or downright rebelling against what I, the author, intended for her.

Now, during the process of rewriting Book II, while discussing my future plans for Nadeshiko, I was once again blindsided by a plot development that I never saw coming. What follows is technically SPOILERS, so skip the next paragraph if you’d prefer to be surprised.

So, over the course of the story, Nadeshiko is going to start a romantic relationship with a mate. A female mate. Said relationship won’t start for a while yet, but it is happening. And to that end, because this is intended to be a story for young adults and sexuality is a part of the story (handled tastefully, I hope), Nadeshiko is now seventeen years old at the start of the story, a few months shy of eighteen. Now, I stress that I had no idea I would be writing a relationship for her when I started the relaunch, so I wrote her as a fourteen-year-old just like I did in the last draft. Over the past few months, as I’ve planned out details, I realized that there was no way I could justify having one of my foremost LGBT+ characters be fourteen without some seriously unfortunate implications, given the extent of what I have planned. Yes, the age of legal adulthood in the world of Tasakeru is thirteen, and yes, it’s supposed to be a different culture, but there are some things you just can’t do. I want Nadeshiko and her mate’s relationship to be progressive and provide some much-needed diversity in the fantasy/YA genre. The last thing I want is for my efforts to be overshadowed by questionable decisions on my part. So, it’s not a major change, in the grand scheme of things, but I hope you’ll understand why it has to be made.

SPOILERS END

So. I managed to finish the new Silent InvenTOYry episode in record time, finishing roughly 80% of the episode in a 48-hour span. I was really happy with how it turned out… which of course meant that YouTube flagged it after a couple days. Their “remove audio” function completely borked the first upload, so I had to delete it and put up this new version today:

This of course meant that I lost all the upvotes and views from the first one, so I’d appreciate it if you guys could help me get them back.

My effort to boost the subscription numbers on my channel seems to finally be working. I hit on the bright idea yesterday of uploading Cure Yell’s transformation and attack footage from the first episode of Hugtto! Precure while it was still hot, and the result was 3000+ hits and a whole bunch of new subs in a day! I’m getting closer and closer to hitting my goal, so I think I’ll do the same for Cure Ange next week, just for the extra boost. After all, the item for my next Precure review won’t be here until after the Feb 20th deadline.

Now then. If I do break 1000, I’ve got something very special planned. As I said in the teaser video I uploaded on Thursday, if I hit the magic number I’ll be hosting a special reward live stream for my followers at a date in the near future. I still have work to do on the technical side of things, but I’ve got a site to stream on that WON’T autoflag me (I hope) and I’ve figured out how to get the media to run on it. More on this in the next few weeks.

And finally, there’s Hugtto itself! Based on the first episode, I’m pretty well sold. I’ll have a more detailed write-up when it’s not so late and once the whole team is assembled, but in brief: Hana/Yell is a precious dork, Hugtan isn’t at all the annoyance I feared she would be, Harry is shaping up to be one of my favorite mascots, the villains are actually threatening, and HOLY CRAP THE COMBAT IS BACK. As far as first episodes go, this one was a definite winner.

So. I hope you’ve all enjoyed both the look into my thought process and the new episode. More stuff coming soon.

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